Your Friendly Neighborhood Music Critic

Lil B & Chance the Rapper –Free (Based Freestyles Mixtape)

“Welcome to this beautiful mixtape,” Free (Based Freestyles Mixtape) opens. It seemed super random; a Lil B & Chance the Rapper collaboration song, let alone a whole mixtape. “You thought it was a joke,” says Chance the Rapper, “we made this the first day we met.”

Known most for his rap meme revolution , “The Cooking Dance,” and his Basedworld, Based God following, Lil B has since ventured off into film, motivational speaking, and apparently possessing the ability to curse basketball players. Since 2009 and his Soulja Boy days of Pretty Boy Millionaires, Lil B has become more “prolific,” “politically and socially aware,” and as he describes, “based” – a mindset all about, “being yourself, not caring what anyone thinks, doing what you want, how you want.” It’s a nice way to think of living, but it also sounds kind of dangerous.

But that’s the idea here on Free (Based Freestyles Mixtape), though super simplified and represented more infantile. “We just taking chances, with Chance,” explains Lil B, and that’s pretty much it. It’s a freestyle mixtape, and Lil B and Chance the Rapper are just being silly, having fun, and expressing their need to feel like they can do whatever they want, after all, they’re both unsigned.

When it comes to projects like this however, material that’s made out of joke/randomness but still real projects, there are so many ways to take it. The way I take it, is it’s just two rappers meeting and having some fun. The songs aren’t too fantastic, it’s mostly nonsense and shoutouts to other musicians whose work they’re currently appreciating, but the mixtape was never intended to go down that route, or have a route really at all.